Pat Howard: Badams goes to school on Erie district's fiscal crisis

Credit Erie schools Superintendent Jay Badams with being a clever fellow. He needed a doctorate to get the big job, so he turned the job into the raw material for his doctorate.

When Badams signed on with the Erie School District in 2009 as assistant superintendent and heir apparent, his contract required that he go about adding Ph.D. to his credentials. It also stipulated that the public would cover the attendant expense.

As Erie Times-News education writer Erica Erwin reported last Sunday, the next phase of Badams' career ended up providing the narrative for his doctoral dissertation. He earned his lofty degree, in other words, by marrying his book learning to the job he did in steering the region's largest school system through its financial meltdown in 2010 and 2011.

The tome carries one of those ponderous academic titles: "School District Budget Crisis: Technical Challenge As A Springboard For Adaptive Change." Sounds like a page-turner, doesn't it?

Fortunately, the story Badams tells and the lessons he gleans from it are more engaging. I might suggest an alternate title: Why waste a crisis?

The crisis was the fiscal fiasco Badams inherited in the summer of 2010 when he took over as superintendent. The budget gap added up to more than $26 million by the time he and his team finished looking under every rock.

That's the "technical challenge" cited in the dissertation's title. The "adaptive change" part refers to the use Badams sought to make of that challenge.

You have to read all 141 pages to get the picture in all its nuance. But the gist of it is that rather than trying to work through the status quo to address the crisis, Badams went about employing the crisis to change the status quo.

He grasped early on that the scale of the bad news had an upside of sorts. The problem was big enough to get and hold the public's and media's attention, and to prevent the Erie School Board from glossing it over by tinkering at the margins.

"Had our deficit been less than $10 million ... the underlying organizational problems could have remained unexamined," he wrote.

So Badams systematically went about training a spotlight on how bad things had gotten. And he didn't shrink from linking that effect to the causes of runaway spending, indiscriminate hiring, inadequate organizational infrastructure and controls, and a back-scratching political culture that enabled it all.

What he didn't do was directly invoke the name of his predecessor, longtime Superintendent James Barker, to personify the failures Badams described. He didn't have to.

"I never had to mention this point," he wrote in his dissertation about the crisis building on Barker's watch, "but it was neither lost on nor ignored by many people, including those in the media."

That, in turn, wasn't lost on Badams. When School Board members received public blowback for their complicity in the mess, Badams wrote, "I routinely intervened to point out that the board would only be able to act on financial information I provided."

Badams needed the board's support and was trying to give its members political cover by deflecting "more responsibility, and perhaps blame to the administration." But his use of the first-person pronoun notwithstanding, he made clear that he knew the fingers would point at Barker.

Those board members bear a full measure of responsibility, of course, and a case can be made that the debacle at the end of Barker's run unfairly cancels out appreciation for the positive changes he brokered earlier in his tenure. That's the danger in saving the worst for last.

Barker's bad ending and exit set the stage for the events recounted in Badams' dissertation, and for the conditions they created for transformational leadership. Badams the student, assessing his performance in light of leadership theory and research, gives himself credit for having "done a good job at bad work."

I'd agree, but that's just the first chapter of his legacy. His success will ultimately be measured by whether he can sustain the course of reform well after the public's focus fades and there's no longer a crisis to force the action.